Phil Doolittle from the UOR campus was here this week to help the transition process along. Great to have him here, and we think we’re positioned for a productive but probably a little crazy final week of transition work with Jim and Eva. We have to-do lists, our assistant Kevin has one, and they should have them too. So this week will be spent checking things off lists in the hopes of giving us what we need to make it through the term with minimal bumps. Bumps will come, we know, but we’d like smaller ones.
While we’ve been learning, Teo and Mara have gone feral. We have a new babysitter, Anjieska, who was a German classmate of ours. She’s very nice, but speaks no English. So, we and the kids communicate with her in German. That doesn’t always work. Dictionaries are located in each room now, and it turns out that Teo is already translating for Mara and occasionally correcting my German. Impressive, and insulting, but whatever… we’ll get over it. Soon we’ll have him negotiating with our employees on our behalf. Anyway, Anjieska doesn’t play by the same disciplinary handbook we do, so the kids aren’t cleaning up after their activities, aren’t always listening, etc. And they seem to get really dirty, but we’re not sure how. We are anxious for Montessori in Salzburg to begin in September, and can only hope that evenings and weekends with us can make up for the mornings with her. We’d like Kasia back, but she selfishly says that her law school future is more important.
We’re having a wonderful time getting to know the instructors for the program, Kevin, our program assistant, and also the friends we’ve met here in Salzburg. Today we went with Brooke/Nathan and family on a beautiful walk in a forest/to a waterfall about a half-hour from Salzburg. Picnic lunches, a beer break before a pit stop (into a toilet that emptied directly into the river), a park with a great zipcord nearby. What more could we ask for? It looks like I’ll be doing a bike ride to Linz with Nathan and some of his friends for a couple of days later this month. Great! And a good reason to finally go and buy that bike!
That was today. Yesterday, just the family went to explore the Festung, the beautiful fortress on the photo of our blog. It looks over al Salzburg, and we and the kids had wonderful time seeing the whole areas from on high (our second time this week, since Father Schwarzfischer had invited us over to the monastery while Phil was here). There were also cannons, instruments of torture, ancient toilets, princess furniture, and everything else a child or adult could want.
Best to All,
Steve
Can't seem to easily/conveniently get photos into this blog, but I (Kim) can get them easily into picasa photos:
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